An imprisoned Iranian laser physicist and a Russian scientist who devoted his life to the struggle for democracy and the rights of neglected children are the recipients of APS's 2014 Andrei Sakharov Prize. The award recognizes the efforts of scientists to advance human rights around the world.

"It's for people who have fought for and contributed to the human rights of scientists and human rights in general," said Joel Lebowitz, a physicist at Rutgers University and Chair of the award's selection committee.

Omid Kokabee, once a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, is now serving a ten-year prison sentence in Iran for "communicating with a hostile government" and possessing "illegal earnings" in the form of his college loans. Kokabee, who is an Iranian citizen, was picked up at the Tehran airport in January of 2011 and put on trial months later. After he was sentenced, he revealed in an open letter that the Iranian government had approached him on several occasions asking him to work for the military. He refused each time, and believes that is the real reason he was arrested.

"He is becoming, if not already, a symbol or icon of the pursuit of science free of political pressure," said Hossein Sadeghpour of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who nominated Kokabee for the award. He added that he nominated him because of "what he did in prison, in captivity. For not succumbing to the pressure to confess to crimes that were alleged against him, and for writing open letters which give us a window, at least partly, [into] why he was kept for refusing to participate in military research work on banned weapons."

He is the first Sakharov Prize recipient incarcerated at the time of the announcement. His affiliation on the award reads "Evin Prison, Tehran."

Boris Altshuler was a close friend and colleague of Andrei Sakharov at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow. The two worked together in the late 1970s advocating anti-authoritarian reforms within the Soviet Union. After Sakharov was arrested and sent into internal exile, Altshuler became his biggest advocate, organizing petitions and publicity for the scientist turned activist.

"When Sakharov had his struggle for human rights, Boris Altshuler was very much involved with that," said Eugene Chudnovsky of the City University of New York, and a member of the selection committee. "He didn't have the standing of Sakharov. He could easily have been sent to prison for many years."

The Soviet government attacked Altshuler's professional career because of his activism. For five years in the mid-eighties the physics professor was demoted to staff janitor at the Institute on the urging of the KGB. After the fall of communism, he continued to advocate for human rights in Russia. In addition, he established "The Right of a Child," to reform and raise awareness about the country's troubled foster care system.

- NATURE | NEWS

Iranian says he was jailed for refusing to engage in military research

Letters from imprisoned physicist describe offers of freedom in exchange for cooperation.

In the public letter, addressed to Ali Sharifi, who Kokabee describes as his former roommate at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Kokabee says that he was asked to collaborate with the military before and during his detention, but always refused. The letter is dated March 2013 and marked as having been written from section 350 of Evin prison in Tehran, which houses those accused of political and security crimes.

See Nature's English translation of his letter (translated from the original Farsi) here:

This is Nature’s translation of Omid Kokabee’s letter from the original Farsi.

Dear Dr Ali Sharifi,

My dear friend and roommate during student years in Sharif University.

First, I hope you and your respected members of family are of good health and joy,

and immersed in God’s blessings. I am writing this letter to you from the section 350

of the Evin Prison – the section for political and security prisoners – on the second

month of the third year of my imprisonment. You are well aware that I was arrested

under the accusation of “gathering and conspiring against the national security of the

country’ on 30 January 2011 and was eventually sentenced to 10 years of

imprisonment for ‘relationship with the hostile State of USA’. I would also like to

remind you that in these instances where a case is being fabricated against a person,

and especially in my case being accused of spying, other individuals avoid me as they

may be accused of conspiracy themselves. In Iran usually no one can object to these

arbitrary security measures, especially when they attempt to fabricate cases against a

person. However, no evidence or witnesses have been presented neither to me nor to

Iranian physicist sentenced to prison: Nature news and comment

Nature, one of the world’s premiere scientific journals, has been following the case of imprisoned physics student Omid Kokabee in Iran. Citing the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Nature’s most recent article about Kokabee is below:

Iranian physicist sentenced to prison

Omid Kokabee gets 10 years in jail for ‘communicating with a hostile government’

by: Michele Catanzaro

(15 May 2012) Omid Kokabee, an Iranian graduate student who has been imprisoned in Tehran for the past 15 months, was sentenced to 10 years on Sunday for allegedly conspiring with foreign countries against Iran.

Judge Abolghasem Salavati of Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolution Court — who is famous for his harsh sentences — tried 10 to 15 people in the same trial, under the collective charge of collaborating with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad.

Kokabee, a graduate student who previously worked on the physics of optics at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain, and more recently at the University of Texas in Austin, was arrested in Tehran in February 2011 on charges of “communicating with a hostile government” and “illegal earnings” (see ‘A year in jail without trial for Iranian student accused of spying’).

Close contacts of Kokabee in Iran have lamented the fact that no proof was presented at the trial to justify the sentence. Whereas other prisoners in the group declared themselves guilty in a television broadcast on the evening before the trial, the physics student has consistently denied all charges and refused to speak in court. (Faces are obscured in the broadcast, but Kokabee may be the person who appears at 24 seconds in a blue shirt.) He plans to appeal the sentence, according to his contacts.

International concern

Since Nature first highlighted Kokabee’s case (see ‘Missing physicist may have been jailed in Iran’), various organizations have written to the Iranian authorities asserting his innocence and asking for a fair trial — including the Committee of Concerned Scientists, a human-rights group based in New York; the American Physical Society in College Park, Maryland; and a group of four international optics organizations. His case has been included as a cause for concern in the report of Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran.

In an open letter written while in prison, Kokabee claimed that the authorities were trying to obtain his “collaboration” through threats to him and his family; in another, he insisted that he was not a political activist, something that his friends confirm. Kokabee’s friends speculate that his frequent trips to Iran — totalling four or five in 2010 — may have aroused the suspicions of the Iranian authorities.

“This will send chills through the Iranian higher-education system, particularly scholars and students who seek to enhance and expand their horizons abroad,” says Hadi Ghaemi, a physicist previously at City University in New York and director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, an association that has recently promoted aninitiative for imprisoned students.

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